Currently, the applications of the flat panel display device become more and more widespread, and this brings more convenience to our lives. Since the electronic paper display device is convenient to carry and has the advantage of low power consumption, the electronic paper display device is regarded as a flat panel display technology of next generation.
The electronic paper display device has two substrates, and the place between the two substrates is poured with black particles which are positively charged, white particles which are negatively charged and solvent. One of the two substrates is transparent. The areas supplied with positive voltage of the transparent substrate will attract the white particles to display white color; the areas supplied with negative voltage of the transparent substrate will attract the black particles to display black color. The other substrate has a plurality of common electrode supplied with a reference voltage. Since the specific gravities of the solvent and the charged particles are about the same, the electronic paper display device has the bistable characteristic. Therefore, even though the electric field disappears, the charged particles will be remained at the same position for a lone time till a next electric field enables the charged particles to move to form another display image. In addition, since it is unnecessary to continue the charge after updating a display image, the power consumption is low.
Generally speaking, the electronic paper display device has a matrix of pixels arranged in a plurality of rows and a plurality of columns, a timing controller and a source driver. The timing controller is configured to sequentially output control signals which correspond to a positive high voltage, a negative high voltage and a ground voltage respectively to the source driver, and the source driver is configured to drive each pixel with the voltages corresponding to the control signals. After a predetermined time length, the effects of supplying voltages to the pixels will be accumulated, so that an updated display image is formed.
In the conventional method for driving a bistable display device, the timing controller controls the source driver to provide voltages to drive each pixel according to received data when a display image of the bistable display device is updated, and the data formats of the control signals transmitted to the source driver do not have any limitation. As to the pixels in different rows of the same column, the driving sequence of the pixels may be generally defined as the arrangement sequence of the pixels. For example, the pixels may be scanned form top to bottom by way of row scanning. At a certain time, a certain pixel may be driven by the positive high voltage, the negative high voltage or the ground voltage. However, if the source driver provides the positive high voltage to one of two pixels in two adjacent rows of the same column and provides the negative high voltage to the other one when the source driver consecutively drives the two pixels during the image updating process, it can be seen after the testing that the source driver will consume a large power because the source driver switches the output voltage by a wide margin. This will result in the display anomalies such as crosstalk and band mura, and the image display quality of the bistable display device will be reduced.